A Haven for the Humanities

At dawn, The Huntington is still—a hush over its 207 acres in San Marino. Inside the Library’s historic core, each archival box holds traces of the past—from the mundane to the extraordinary: a note in the margin, a map of conquest, a letter of resistance. 

By midmorning, that stillness becomes quiet work. In the Library’s reading rooms, the art galleries, and the Botanical Gardens, ideas cross centuries and disciplines. What begins as scholarship becomes something larger: a way of asking how we live with the past and what responsibilities come with knowing it. 

Throughout the day, the humanities come alive—not as fields under pressure, but as a practice of attention. To read a letter, trace a pigment, or map a migration is to study how meaning moves through ordinary lives. At The Huntington, that quiet work continues, a reminder that the humanities are not only about preservation but participation—an active conversation between history and the world we inhabit now. 

Morning in the Reading Room 

Scott Doebler opens a slim volume bound in red leather—a 1545 letter by Bartolomé de las Casas. The Dominican friar, one of the most famous and conflicted figures of the 16th century, warns that Spanish demands for tribute and forced labor in Yucatán and Guatemala will spark rebellion. “He was right,” Doebler says. “The Maya rose up a year later.” The paper, yellowed but sturdy, bears the friar’s tight, abbreviated script—s’s curling like sixes, n’s dropped entirely. Around it, the scent of soap from freshly washed hands mingles with the climate-controlled air of the room.  

Doebler, a Dibner Research Fellow in the History of Science & Technology and assistant professor at the University of Wyoming, is writing an environmental history of the Maya and their tropical forest world between 1517 and 1717. Working in Spanish, English, and two Mayan languages—Yucatec and Chontal—he reconstructs what he calls “more-than-human communities,” places where people, plants, and animals co-created systems of survival. His project, Lure of the Lowlands, draws on The Huntington’s rare books on Yucatán and Guatemala, English-Caribbean maritime records, and materials from the Botanical collections that document tropical forests.  

A favorite discovery came in a 16th-century chronicle by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, whose sketch shows conquistadors strapping their horses to two canoes to cross a crocodile-filled river—a moment, Doebler says, “when the environment itself pushed back.” Such images invert the familiar tale of conquest, revealing how forests resisted and helped the Maya remain independent.  

Doebler sees a modern echo in that story. “We’re living in a moment when tropical forests are being cleared all over the world,” he says. “People still assume prosperity and forests can’t coexist. History shows they can.”  

“One of the coolest things about The Huntington,” he added, “is that it’s a more-than-human community—people, art, plants, hummingbirds—all part of a shared ecosystem of care. Maybe The Huntington is a microcosm of how we might think about history.” 

Late Morning in Special Collections 

Doebler’s study of forest resilience finds a counterpart in Wendy Cheng’s research on plant migration—how living collections embody layered histories of beauty, displacement, and care. By late morning Cheng, the Simon and June Li Fellow, lifts a folder from the archive and studies a page covered in looping script. The handwriting wavers, part record-keeping, part devotion. A professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC, she is writing a book of essays on plant migration and human–plant relations—an inquiry into how “our everyday experiences and perspectives shift if we pay more attention to plant life, and see plants as living histories—Indigenous, immigrant, local—that have been heavily shaped by humans but also have their own stories to tell.” 

Working across archives, living collections, and gardens, Cheng traces how beauty and plunder travel together. “Like humans, plants have been displaced and exploited, their ecosystems compromised, destroyed, or transformed by capitalist and colonial systems,” she says. “Beauty is complicated—it can be possessive and exploitative, too—but at its core, my focus on beauty is about the kind of life-affirming joy that interacting with and learning from plants provides for so many people, even in the worst of circumstances.” 

Her project focuses in part on camellias—plants that “embody hundreds of years of history between East Asia and the West.” They traveled the same imperial routes as tea, she notes, but “the stories of each set of human hands that cared for them, shaped them, loved them, have come to have their own lives and logics.” Los Angeles, she adds, is “an important place in global camellia history.” 

Among The Huntington’s holdings that Cheng studies are the William Hertrich papers, the Ralph Peer correspondence archive, and the Japanese Garden file. The plant accession records and the living camellia collections, especially along the North Vista and Camellia Garden Walk, allow her to compare the archive against what still grows. Her favorite specimen is the Camellia japonica ‘California’, reportedly the oldest camellia plant in Southern California. “It arrived from Japan in 1888 and once lived on the Hollywood Hills estate of music producer Ralph Peer,” she says. “This plant embodies one strand of Southern California camellia history and the wealthy individuals who stewarded them amidst a variety of circumstances.” 

Rodriguez first worked on site as a 2020–21 Caltech–Huntington Art + Research Fellow, creating pieces for Borderlands, a project begun in 2021 to widen the narrative of American art. Among the works is Rodriguez-Mondragón’s Federal Indian Boarding Schools Map of the South Western United States and Child Migrant Detention Centers (2022), a hand-processed watercolor on amate based on an 1864 railroad map and U.S. border survey from the Library’s holdings; orange and violet markers plot nineteenth-century boarding schools and contemporary child migrant detention centers—displaying visual evidence across centuries of displacement. 

Another recent work, YOU ARE HERE, maps Los Angeles across time, layering topography, languages, land use, native plants and animals, and references to uprisings and epidemics. It invites viewers to locate personal histories within a multilingual cartography of place.  

“The importance of artists engaging with The Huntington’s collections and scholarly communities is more critical than ever,” Rodriguez says. “In an era when voices are systematically erased and silenced—and as our communities and universities come under siege—it is up to artists, writers, and scholars to create work that reflects these challenging times, grounded in factual history and rigorous research.” 

As afternoon turns to evening, research ideas move from studio to stage, entering public life. 

Evening in Rothenberg Hall 

By dusk, a sold-out audience fills Rothenberg Hall to hear Catherine Ceniza Choy, the Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellow. She steps to the podium for her public lecture, “Inventor of Magic Food: The Life and Legacy of Filipina Food Scientist Maria Ylagan Orosa.” 

Orosa—a chemist, humanitarian, and wartime hero—invented banana ketchup and a vitamin-rich flour that saved prisoners in camps during World War II. Choy, professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Asian American Histories of the United States (Beacon, 2022), is at work on a biography of Orosa, tracing her letters, laboratory notes, and family papers through Filipino and American archives. During her lecture, she emphasized the genre’s power: “We need more biographies. They can give a multidimensional sense of individual lives.” 

At The Huntington, Choy’s research has centered on three key holdings: the George William Beattie and Helen Pruitt Beattie papers (1853–1944), which include photographs of the Philippine Islands; rare books such as Trumbull White’s Our New Possessions (1898), a U.S. colonial survey of its “new” territories; and Bulletins of the Bureau of Education in the Philippines from the early 1900s. These sources frame Orosa’s scientific career within the transformation of education and food production under American rule. 

Among the images Choy has studied is a photograph from the Beattie papers titled Open Court in Normal School Dormitory. It shows young Filipina students taking tea in an open-air courtyard lush with hanging and potted plants, their Filipiniana garment sleeves edged with translucent piña cloth woven from pineapple fiber. For Choy, the image captures the convergence of women’s education, botany, and colonial modernity—an environment that helped shape Orosa’s conviction that science could be an instrument of survival and service. “The breadth of her work with plants in order to achieve Philippine self-sufficiency, her humanitarian efforts to address malnutrition, and, of course, her most famous invention of the beloved condiment, banana ketchup, deserve our attention,” Choy says.

Turning back to the audience, Choy ends her talk with gratitude: “Mabuhay The Huntington and all of you and your support for the humanities.” Mabuhay—a Filipino expression meaning “long live” or “may you live well”—sends the room into applause, a fitting close to the day: cultural research leaving the archive and reentering the world. 
 
Outside Rothenberg Hall, the national picture shifts: the humanities face a harsher climate. 

A Haven in a Hostile Climate 

“The humanities have always weathered cycles of contraction and renewal, although the headwinds feel stronger than ever at this historical moment,” says Karen R. Lawrence, president of The Huntington. “We can’t control the storm, but we can build structures that protect ideas.” 

Across the country, graduate programs are being scaled back or pausing admissions—recently at Boston University (English, history, philosophy) for 2025–26 and at the University of Chicago (most arts & humanities Ph.D. programs) for 2026–27.  National data shows a 15-year downward slide in humanities degrees and faculty hiring reduced to historic lows. The share of tenure-line jobs has fallen to about one-third of the professoriate.  

The National Council on the Humanities—an advisory group of scholars and private citizens that counsels the National Endowment for the Humanities on grants and policy—also underwent abrupt change this fall when the White House dismissed its members, according to the New York Times.  

In contrast, the reading rooms at The Huntington are full. 

Each year, The Huntington supports roughly 150 research fellows drawn from a pool of thousands of applicants—and welcomes more than 2,000 additional readers annually who conduct independent research in its collections. The Huntington has supported more than 12,000 scholars since the program’s founding in 1928. In a moment when university resources shrink and public funding wanes, these fellowships form one of the largest and longest-running centers for humanistic research in the nation. 

Under her tenure, The Huntington has expanded its fellowships to include artists and independent researchers, affirming that humanistic inquiry belongs to anyone engaged in the pursuit of meaning. “You don’t need a university appointment for these collections to belong to you,” she adds. 

The Huntington now offers awards specifically for those outside traditional academia, including the Alan Jutzi Residential Fellowship for Non-Traditional Scholars, the Elizabeth B. Motika Fellowship in Architectural History, and the Thomas W. Wilkins Fellowship. 

Each research fellow also shapes the others. 

Artists and independent scholars, Juster adds, bring new perspectives that help others see the archives differently. 

“We’re big enough to support traditional scholars,” she says, “but flexible enough to include people working in other modes. That diversity makes the conversations deeper and richer.” 

She adds, “Doing archival research makes you a better thinker. It’s one of the few things that teaches patience and humility.” 

In April 2025, the cancellation of several National Endowment for the Humanities grants reduced external support at The Huntington by about $350,000—funding that would have covered multiple fellowships over three years. Donors Heather and Paul G. Haaga Jr., and June and Simon Li, quickly stepped in to sustain most of those opportunities, underscoring the strength of the partnerships that keep The Huntington’s research mission moving forward. 

The Scholar-President 

When Karen R. Lawrence became president of The Huntington in 2018, she brought decades of experience as a scholar, teacher, and institutional leader. A James Joyce specialist, former president of Sarah Lawrence College, and former dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Humanities, Lawrence saw The Huntington’s future not as expansion but as integration. Her phrase, “One Huntington,” captures the idea that its three collections—Library, Art, and Botanical Gardens—each formidable on their own, are even more powerful together.

Her tenure has coincided with a period of change for the humanities nationally, but she views those pressures as an opportunity to reaffirm The Huntington’s public mission.  

Lawrence has worked to position The Huntington as both a research institution and a civic forum—a place where scholarship and public life meet. Under her leadership, The Huntington launched the Why It Matters conversation series, which brings cultural leaders and thinkers into public dialogue on the role of the humanities. It most recently featured the visionary filmmaker, Ava DuVernay. Lawrence has advanced the modernization of the historic Library building through the Library/Art Building Project (“the LAB” project), ensuring future accessibility and reflecting the institution’s “One Huntington” integration across collections. She has also championed the acquisition of major literary archives, including Thomas Pynchon, as well as masterpieces in the art collection by Thomas Cole, Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, and Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, enabled through a partnership with The Ahmanson Foundation. 

Together, these efforts reflect Lawrence’s belief that the future of the humanities lies not only in connection—between disciplines and between scholars and the public—but in continued investment: in the people, spaces, and resources that make that connection possible.

Together with Herbert, Dawson carried that archival immersion into public life. Their project Open Water: Histories of Afroaquatics, supported by Durham University, UC Merced, and the Oakland youth organization We Lead Ours, used early modern sources to address a modern crisis: disproportionately high drowning rates in Black communities in the United States and England. Through hands-on workshops, visual art, and puzzle-based learning, Open Water invites young people and their families to reclaim a lineage of skill and belonging. In 2024, the program was recognized by the United States Rowing Association for advancing access and inclusion in aquatic sports.  

Dawson, author of Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) and winner of the 2019 Harriet Tubman Prize from the Schomburg Center, viewed this continuum—from archive to waterway—as the humanities at their most vital. “History doesn’t just correct the past,” he says. “It can save lives.”  

Devoney Looser — Jane Austen, Reimagined 

In The Huntington’s reading room, Devoney Looser traced Jane Austen’s afterlives—on the page, the stage, and the screen. A Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, she came to The Huntington in 2024–25 as a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow to work on The Stunning Gunnings, a group biography of two generations of 18th- and 19th-century women who turned their notoriety into art. 

Looser’s research often begins with the tangible: a pamphlet from the 1800 trial of Austen’s aunt, Jane Leigh Perrot; a volume of The Loiterer, the Oxford periodical edited by Austen’s brothers, where her writing may have appeared under the name “Sophia Sentiment”; and the imprint of her great-uncle, the London bookseller Stephen Austen, who published The Female Physician (1730), a guide to midwifery and women’s health. Each object in The Huntington’s Leigh family papers offers a clue to the networks that shaped Austen’s life and those who later claimed her.

For Wild for Austen (St. Martin’s Press, 2025), released for the novelist’s 250th birthday, Looser drew on those same holdings to tell a livelier story—of thieves, abolitionists, and ghosts, but also of readers who made Austen their own. In the Porter family papers, she found early admirers recommending Emma in 1816 letters; in the archives of playwright Zoë Akins and novelist Kingsley Amis, she traced Austen’s migration to Hollywood and modern satire. Wallace Stevens’s signed Novels of Jane Austen sits only shelves away from Akins’s 1937 Pride and Prejudice screenplay—a juxtaposition that, for Looser, captures what she calls “the wildness of reception.” 

“Jane Austen didn’t write just for specialists,” Looser reminds her audiences. “Neither should we.” 

On Dec. 2, she will introduce a screening of the 2005 film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Linking her archival discoveries to Austen’s enduring presence in popular culture, Looser turns scholarship outward—a historian of reading who invites the public to read alongside her.  

Alyssa Collins — Writing the Future Through the Archive 

 
In the quiet of The Huntington’s Ahmanson Reading Room, Alyssa Collins turned the pages of Octavia E. Butler’s notebooks and drafts—cells of thought replicating across decades. Here, in one of the Library’s most requested collections, she traced the author’s fascination with genetics, evolution, and what she called cellularity: the notion that survival itself can occur at the microscopic level.  

Collins, assistant professor of gender and women’s studies at California State University, Northridge, served as The Huntington’s inaugural Octavia E. Butler Fellow in 2021–22. Her project, “Cellular Blackness: Octavia E. Butler’s Posthuman Ontologies,” examined Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy as a touchstone, exploring how the novelist wove science and spirit into visions of Black feminist endurance. 

In an interview for The Huntington’s scholarly blog, Verso, she said, “I don’t think you ever really expect to enter someone’s archive and have them continually surprise you, especially with all the research we do as scholars. However, I can say that even though I started out knowing Butler as an incredible writer and scholar, every day I spend in her archive only increases my esteem for her.”

“My time as a fellow was exciting not only because of the work I was able to initiate and expand, but also because of the scholarly community that I was able to experience. Several fellows in my cohort offered invaluable advice and support, and I have relationships from that time that continue to this day,” she says. “My growing experience with the archive and the continued opportunity to share Butler’s work with my students, colleagues, and the community have been truly amazing, and the relationships built along the way have been equally as special.”

Last Light 

The lamps in the Ahmanson Reading Room go dark one by one.  

Beyond the gates, debate over the value of the humanities continues. Inside, the work endures. 

“The humanities are civic infrastructure,” Lawrence says. “They’re the systems of thought and imagination that hold a community together. They help us see how we got here—and how we might build a more connected society. There has never been a more important time to invest in them.”